‘‘He was one of the finest officers I have seen in terms of conceptualising and implementation. To my mind, he would rank in the top 2 per cent of India’s bureaucracy.’’ Infosys Chairman N R Narayana Murthy, a man with little patience for blemished work, does not dish out praise lightly. Closely involved with state government efforts to refurbish Bangalore, Murthy was talking to The Indian Express of Jayakar Jerome, a bureaucrat who in four years gave Bangalore a vision of what might be, rebuilding the city with the vision and speed of an Infosys software programme. In the four years before he was unceremoniously turfed out as Commissioner of the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA)—to remarkable scenes of weeping staff—the Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1974 batch managed to keep the city abreast with its explosive growth. With a crack team of planners, engineers and finance specialists—overseen by the city’s best minds in the form of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force monitoring his work—Jerome and his team worked 24/7, kept Bangalore going (see box), and turned around a demoralised, loss-making government organisation. And all this without central funding, without ruinous debt. When Jerome took over the BDA in 1999, it was about to be shut down by the government. Today, it’s the toast of urban governance with a cash stash of Rs 1,600 crore. But Jerome isn’t around to start the next stage of city building with the money. As Secretary of the Minority Welfare Department, he and a solitary personal assistant occupy a deserted office, without proper flooring or much work. ‘‘I have no comments to make,’’ a terse, grim-faced Jerome says when approached by The Indian Express. WHAT JAYAKAR JEROME DID, WHAT DHARAM SINGH TRASHED • ‘‘In 1999, I saw a file. BDA members had taken a resolution amongst themselves. It had become a white elephant, and they said it had to be wound up. I thought the BDA could become the vehicle to change Bangalore. I called Jerome and said I would like to give you a very challenging but depressing job. He said I have two conditions: He wanted direct access to me and he wanted no political interference. I conceded both points. In one year, the BDA became the talking point of the city.’’ S M Krishna, former Karnataka Chief Minister About 175 acres of BDA land worth Rs 700 crore was regularised. Even today, Jerome is fighting 60 court cases. Meanwhile, in a city where the exploding IT industry is running short of expansion space, land grabs are restarting. They could ruin critical BDA decongestion plans. Jerome had finalised a peripheral road and a 10-km-long high-tech corridor. The first—the notification due in June is still not out—could permanently divert trucks from the city. The second could be a vast base for the tech industry and remove the smaller IT firms now despoiling residential neighbourhoods. But the Jerome witch-hunt didn’t end with his transfer. In August, Gowda wrote a 29-page letter to Singh, alleging that Jerome ‘‘looted crores of rupees.flouted rules and regulations.had underhand dealings.’’ Stunned, Jerome requested permission to file a defamation case against Gowda. The government refused. It’s a shambolic end, said anguished industry leaders like Murthy, for a bureaucrat who won a city’s acclaim. It wasn’t just CEOs. Jerome fixed the BDA’s worst problems: like reducing the 10 years it took get a sale deed—to immediate handover once payment was made. Annual report cards and surveys done by the Public Affairs Centre, a public watchdog, indicate the transformation. To quote one finding: in 1999, only 16 per cent of citizens were “partly satisfied” with the BDA’s working. By 2003, that figure had risen to 70 per cent, with an additional 15 per cent filling a category that the BDA had never seen—‘‘fully satisfied’’.
